About the Film

In the spring of 1903, on a whim and a fifty-dollar bet, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson set off from San Francisco in a 20-horsepower Winton touring car hoping to become the first person to cross the United States in the new- fangled "horseless carriage." Most people doubted that the automobile had much of a future.

Traveling with his co-driver Sewall K. Crocker and a bulldog named Bud, Jackson's trip would prove them wrong. Using a treasure trove of photographs, and relying on previously unpublished letters, Ken Burns and Florentine Films put viewers in the front seat of this historic — and hilarious — journey.